Reagan

by Bob Spitz

  The House Un-American Activities Committee—whose acronym, HUAC, sent chills down the spines of politically active filmmakers—launched an anticommunist crusade that terrorized the community for almost a decade. Were there radicals and communists in Hollywood? You could throw a stone and hit one at any studio. But as Ronald Reagan later pointed out to a skeptical columnist, “I’m not in favor of outlawing any political party. If we ban the Communists . . . we set a precedent. Tomorrow it may be the Democratic or the Republican Party that gets the ax.”

  That sentiment was upright and magnanimous—on its surface. Time and again, in public and in private, Reagan had condemned the practice of Red-baiting as unpatriotic, but he also despised communism, and increasingly sought to undermine its tenets.

  He was in the right place. The presidency of the Screen Actors Guild gave him the soapbox from which to launch an anticommunism campaign, and a faction of his membership was ready to ride sidekick. There had always been a predominantly conservative element at the top of the guild. Robert Montgomery, Adolphe Menjou, Dick Powell, Robert Taylor, and George Murphy, among others, were determined to oust the liberal influence that they said corrupted Hollywood and was a threat to American ideals. They belonged as well to the Motion Picture Alliance, a breakaway watchdog group, whose members included Gary Cooper, Ginger Rogers, John Wayne, Ward Bond, Charles Coburn, and ZaSu Pitts. The MPA’s charter made no bones about its ultimate goal. “In our special field of motion pictures, we resent the growing impression that this industry is made up of, and dominated by, Communists, radicals and crackpots,” it stated. “We pledge to fight, with our organized command, any effort of any group or individual, to divert the loyalty of the screen from the free America that gave it birth.” The MPA set its sights on suspected sympathizers— “subversives,” as it labeled them. The era of Red-baiting in Hollywood had begun in earnest.

  The Screen Actors Guild became a hotbed of infighting. On September 12, 1947, at a routine SAG board meeting, a proposal was raised that would require all SAG members to sign a loyalty oath. Ronnie felt it was self-defeating, “inasmuch as there would be no reason Communists would not sign it since it would give them a screen against any person who failed to sign such an oath.” Instead, he proposed making the oath voluntary. It was passed after little debate.

  Reagan signed an affidavit that very night, along with five other officers of the guild. Only Anne Revere, its treasurer, refused “for principle.” Later, she recalled being unsettled by Ronnie’s response to a question from the floor about dealing with HUAC, should they be called to testify. “You know, anybody that’s got a problem,” he said, “all they have to do is come talk to us.” The reply was greeted by an uneasy silence, until Revere raised her hand and said, “I have a problem; what’s your suggestion?”

  “It’s so simple,” Ronnie responded. “All you’ve got to do is just name a couple of names that have already been named.”

  Just name a couple of names. It was a glib suggestion for a serious ethical problem that was roiling Hollywood. HUAC was demanding that people turn in the names of anyone they suspected of disloyalty or engaging in subversive activities. So-called friendly witnesses, many from the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, came forward to volunteer the names of colleagues with alleged Communist affiliations. Robert Taylor, Richard Arlen, Leo McCarey, Adolphe Menjou, and others fingered fellow actors, directors, and producers they had worked with. Jack Warner divulged the name of every liberal, left-winger, or union member who worked for him, all of whom he labeled “Communist.”

  The SAG loyalty oaths were a knee-jerk reaction to a government inquisition that was tightening its grip. FBI agents had long leaned on industry informants to supply the bureau with names of people expressing anti-American sentiment. Walt Disney, for one, routinely shared information about people he considered “Commie sons-of-bitches” with the FBI and with representatives of HUAC. Records show that Ronald Reagan did as well, making contact with the FBI as early as September 17, 1941, and later cooperating, with Jane, in April 1947, when he was recruited as Source T-10, naming “at least six SAG members whom they suspected of being Communists.” Nor would it be the last time.* In fact, Parnell Thomas, a New Jersey congressman heading HUAC, claimed that, thanks to the Motion Picture Alliance, “hundreds of very prominent film capital people have been named as Communists to us.” Since 1944, congressional investigators had been rooting through FBI files, compiling long lists of suspected communists in the movie business. Suspicion fell on anyone who “had openly worked for causes ranging from the Roosevelt reelection campaigns to international anti-fascism to organizing and supporting labor activity.”

  In the fall of 1947, the hammer came down. In what could be viewed in hindsight as a pivotal, if blockheaded, act, the Producers Guild volunteered its “full cooperation” with the HUAC Mafiosi, thus touching off a witch hunt that called Hollywood leftists to account for their beliefs. Pink subpoenas were issued to scores of the film community, demanding they appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington. The Hollywood Reporter and Variety published the names of more than forty people who had been called, a majority of them screenwriters or screenwriter-directors whose work was considered full of communist propaganda. Another list identified “the conservative eminences” who were invited to testify as friendly witnesses to the communist threat: Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, Walt Disney, Robert Montgomery, Adolphe Menjou, George Murphy, Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor, and Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela.

  An additional friendly witness received his subpoena on September 25. Ronald Reagan was happy to receive it. He was eager to speak his piece.

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  His domestic affairs were deteriorating. Jane had withdrawn into the character of Belinda McDonald, the tormented deaf-mute living in isolation and shame on remote Cape Breton, a coastal province of Nova Scotia. She had tapped into her own miserable childhood to convey her character’s inner life. The subplot, in which she struggles to keep from losing her baby, cut close to the bone. The work was intense and all-consuming, and it reverberated at home.

  Ronnie hoped things would lighten up for her when the company went on location to Mendocino, an old logging community about two hundred miles north of San Francisco. The director Jean Negulesco was famous for his location photography and for getting good work from difficult actresses, most recently Geraldine Fitzgerald in Three Strangers and Ida Lupino in Deep Valley. Jane would be in good hands. But the work took its toll. “When she would come in the door [after a day’s shooting],” Ronnie said, “I could just tell by the way she came in . . . bad day.”

  He decided to accompany Jane to the set, making an eighteen-hour drive along the California coastline. Jane was locked into her role, not particularly receptive to his chatter. After a day spent bumping around the set, Ronnie packed up and returned to Los Angeles. No doubt the situation made him feel out of place. The village was sleepy, a primitive old campsite; accommodations for the actors were makeshift at best. There was no place in town for them to unwind, which drew cast and crew unusually close together. “We felt so isolated, yet oddly at peace,” Jane recalled. They mingled for hours by a cedar lake near their cabins, watching the mist form over the water and the mountains vanish as twilight fell. “In the evenings we made our own fun, formed a community sing among our company—hymns and folk songs.”

  Jean Negulesco helped fan the camaraderie, organizing outings to nearby Russian Gulch. Hours were set aside for late-afternoon swims. Meals were mostly taken together. The actors created their own world in Mendocino, discovering a refuge from the toxic political atmosphere they’d left behind.

  The poignant subject of the movie and the inspirational locale encouraged them to talk to one another about their lives and their work in ways that were strikingly personal, even confessional. Jane found she was able to express herself without the magpie
sermonizing and run-on minutiae that animated so much of Ronnie’s ambition. More and more, she was drawn to her philosophical, deeply spiritual co-star, Lew Ayres. She’d become extremely fond of the man who initially considered her nothing more than a “hey-hey blonde ingénue” and unequipped, certainly lacking the depth, to deliver the powerful performance the role required.

  Ayres was something of an enigma in Hollywood. He’d attracted attention as the confused and remorseful young soldier in All Quiet on the Western Front, before finding stardom as the eponymous lead in the Dr. Kildare series. A combination of offbeat qualities set him apart from his Hollywood counterparts. He was a quiet, pensive man and longtime vegetarian, who prayed every day and was guided by deep religious convictions, especially those opposing cruelty toward mankind. An accomplished musician, he sat in with renowned orchestras and played on some jazz recordings. But his career had been turned upside down. He’d been a conscientious objector during World War II, causing an uproar with sweeping repercussions, including a front-page drubbing in the Hollywood Reporter. The Army Medical Corps deployed him as a chaplain’s assistant to the front lines in the South Pacific, where, under constant fire, he administered medical assistance and prayer to men wounded and dying. He returned home a hero.

  Jane couldn’t avoid contrasting the two men. She admired Ayres’s soulfulness, his quiet independence and common touch. He was compassionate. He was easy to talk to. Ronnie, on the other hand, was in his own world, leading the guild, fighting communists, testifying in Washington, informing for the FBI. Neglecting his family. They rarely shared intimate talks. It wasn’t what she had envisioned in a marriage.

  It helped her to be around Lew Ayres. They took long walks, discussing their work on Johnny Belinda, talking over their lives. A relationship developed—“platonic—yes, but it was intense,” according to a studio publicist—and it set in motion a reevaluation of her marriage.

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  Ronnie sensed something was up. The Hollywood film community was notoriously gossipy, with a robust grapevine, and word flitted around pretty freely about Jane’s new Mendocino infatuation. Reliable or not, it was impossible for Ronnie to ignore, and he spent as much time as possible visiting Jane on the set.

  Between SAG business and the upcoming HUAC hearings, however, he had little free time. By his account, he “was spending five nights a week at the guild,” leading the arrangements for a new ten-year labor pact with motion-picture producers. Negotiations stretched on for five punishing months.

  On April 21, 1947, Jack Warner, in a screed facilitated by the Hollywood Reporter, called for an “All Out Fight on Commies” who had infiltrated moviemaking. Then, on May 15, he appeared as a friendly witness before the investigative committee in Washington, D.C. Without being asked to name names, he voluntarily blurted out sixteen writers his studio employed who were “injecting Communist stuff” into screenplays.* Most of his accusations were laughable at best, inaccurate at worst. His announcement that Warner Bros. would be happy to organize a “pest removal fund” to get rid of the “ideological termites” was typical blather. Even so, it gave the committee the extra ammunition it needed to accuse nineteen Hollywood men as being agents of subversion and called on them to appear as witnesses—“unfriendly witnesses,” as the Hollywood Reporter dubbed them.

  The hearings opened on October 20, 1947, amid the kind of spectacle that Cecil B. DeMille would have envied. The Old House Office Building was full to bursting; a breathless horde elbowed its way into the second floor Caucus Room. The media trucked in a bank of newsreel cameras, heavy broadcast equipment, a full battalion of technicians and engineers, and a national press corps of close to one hundred. Film crews lit the scene with klieg lights. It was a star-studded event. The revolving cast for the weeklong session included everyone from Louis B. Mayer and Walt Disney to Gary Cooper and Robert Taylor to a group who supported the writers and called itself the Committee for the First Amendment, which included Danny Kaye, Bogie and Bacall, Gene Kelly, June Havoc, and John Huston. Ronald Reagan was to appear on the final day, but he was upstaged, for the most part, by his colleagues, many of whom couldn’t wait to turn on the Nineteen.

  Adolphe Menjou, an outspoken opponent of any federally funded social program who famously declared, “Scratch a do-gooder like Hepburn, and they’ll yell ‘Pravda,’” behaved like a diva during his appearance. Time noted how he “sauntered jauntily up to the witness stand,” bowed and smiled to applauding fans, then rattled off names faster than an auctioneer at Sotheby’s. Robert Taylor suggested the government round up his communist colleagues and “send them back to Russia or some other unpleasant place.” Louis B. Mayer fingered directors Edward Dmytryk and Adrian Scott and writers Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, and Donald Ogden Stewart, all of whom were known for their first-rate work at MGM. Robert Montgomery and George Murphy, in subsequent mealy-mouth performances, gave just enough credence to support the innuendo.

  To his credit, Ronald Reagan referred to a “small group within the Screen Actors Guild which . . . has been suspected of more or less following the tactics that we associate with the Communist Party,” but admitted he had no concrete evidence they were, in fact, party members. He named no names. When it came to a question about communist infiltration of the Screen Writers Guild—namely, the Nineteen slated as unfriendly witnesses—Ronnie rejected it as “hearsay.”

  On the whole, Reagan’s testimony was bloodless, a dodge. The former lifeguard artfully treaded water. He knew how to avoid being pulled under by the treacherous current. By his account, the accused writers were nothing more than “strange creatures crawling from under the make-believe rocks.” They would have to sink or swim on their own accord. He met with committee counsel prior to his appearance to determine what they expected of him and how much leeway he’d be given on the stand to express his views. As president of SAG he intended to promote the guild as a democratic bulwark able to “fight against the inroads of any ideology,” while putting in a few words to praise the beleaguered film industry.

  Then Hollywood went into damage control. After ten of the nineteen “unfriendly witnesses” refused to answer HUAC’s questions and were cited for contempt, the producers beat Congress to the punch by blacklisting them.* The studio bosses delivered the coup de grâce. On December 3, 1947, in a show of extraordinary unity, they met in a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York to hammer out a joint statement, a portion of which “deplor[ed] the action of the ten Hollywood men who were cited for contempt” by Congress and pledged to “forthwith discharge or suspend” them without pay. There’d be no work for these creatures anywhere in the movie business. At no time did it mention the word “blacklist,” although that’s what it was. MGM’s general manager, Eddie Mannix, insisted to a worried screenwriter that no such list existed, but assured him “that when I get back to the studio, I’ll have your name taken off it.”

  As Garry Wills noted, “The purging of suspected Communists was a preemptive move on Hollywood’s part to keep the government away.” In effect, “running them out of the business—for the good of the business.” No government oversight would be necessary.

  Ronnie apparently saw nothing wrong in this, or if he did, he kept it to himself. After returning from the Washington hearings, he proposed and helped to pass a SAG resolution mandating that every board member sign an affidavit avowing “that he is not a member of the Communist Party nor affiliated with such a party.” This effectively locked out any of the Ten or their compatriots from serving in the guild’s executive ranks.

  Ronnie didn’t figure into the greater struggle. The Screen Actors Guild, he told actress Gale Sondergaard, was staunchly opposed to any secret blacklist. On the other hand, SAG wasn’t about to force any studio to hire an actor who “so offended public opinion that he has made himself unsaleable at the box office.” No, he wanted no part of that business. He had his own battle to fight.

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  When Ronnie returned to Los Angles in early November, Jane ambushed him coming up the walk, demanding a divorce and insisting that he vacate the premises. He was “blindsided,” he told Hedda Hopper shortly afterward. “I suppose there had been warning signs,” he said in retrospect, but the fact was he’d been too damned distracted. Jane’s order, coming without warning as it did, seemed unconvincing. Only two months earlier they’d been expecting another baby. And they’d agreed to star in a movie together—a film version of Norman Krasna’s romantic farce, John Loves Mary, that was still running on Broadway to sold-out houses. The way Ronnie saw it, they had so much going for them. There had to be a way to patch things up. In the end, he got Jane to sleep on her decision—to talk through their difficulties with him on the chance they could save their marriage.

  To Jane, however, talking was the problem. His incessant chatter infuriated her. Day and night, it never stopped. During a recent evening out with Viveca Lindfors and Don Siegel, when Ronnie launched into a typical run-on dialogue, she sputtered, “Hey, ‘diarrhea of the mouth,’ shut up! Maybe we can get a word in edgewise.” The man was unable to give it a rest. “Ronnie talked all the time,” a friend agreed. He was the authority on everything under the sun: sports, horses, politics, Reds—you name it, he’d launch into a long-winded lecture. June Allyson remembered Jane telling her, “Don’t ask Ronnie what time it is because he will tell you how a watch is made.”

  They tried holding the marriage together, but couldn’t get a strong enough grip. A reporter observed them having dinner at Le Papillon and felt an unmistakable chill emanating from their booth. “They weren’t laughing at all, and their few smiles were pretty wooden,” she said. “Once or twice Ronnie went into long dissertations, and I gathered from Jane’s expression that she was pretty uninterested in what he was saying.” A few nights later they had a blow-up outside the Beverly Club, a favorite show-business haunt. While he was helping her into the car, Jane was overheard shouting, “I got along without you before, and I certainly can get along without you now.”